By the end of the fifteenth century, however, northern Europe had experienced substantial commercial growth, especially in the Hanse cities bordering the North Sea and the Baltic. Greater security of persons and property, established in law and enforced through courts and recognized political entities, spurred commerce and economic investments. Growing
Security in exchanges and transactions opened up whole new trades and routes of commerce, especially in the northern and western regions of Europe. This rise often augmented the old trades in the Mediterranean, but the new trades grew faster than the old.
Noteworthy as well was the rapid increase in Europe’s population, which was recovering from the famines of the early fourteenth century and, most important, from the Black Death of 1347 and 1348. In England, for example, the population had fallen from 3.7 million in 1348 to less than 2.2 million in the 1370s; France probably lost 40 percent of its population; and losses elsewhere vary in estimates from 30 to 50 percent. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the demographic revival from that catastrophe added to the commercial growth and shifting concentrations of economic activity. The rapid growth of populations and growing commercialization of Europe’s economies were significant building blocks in the strengthening of Europe’s fledgling nation-states. Expansion in Europe and elsewhere—including, ultimately, America—was also part of the nation-building process.
For centuries, Catholic Europe had been pitted in war against the Muslim armies of Islam with one Crusade following another. By the fifteenth century, the age of Renaissance, Europe forged ahead in many political, commercial (and seagoing), and military areas. This century was a turning point, speeding the pace of an arms race among competing nations and empires. The year 1492 is as celebrated in Christian Spain for its capture of Granada from the Moors, ending seven centuries of Muslim rule there, as it is in the United States for Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America.
World History
